Character · One Punch Man
Saitama
He beat a crab monster, kept training, lost all his hair, and has been bored ever since.
In Otakana the clue reads: Bald hero who ends every fight with one hit
- Type
- Character
- Series
- One Punch Man
- Letters
- 7 · Easy
Saitama is an unemployed man in a shabby flat who trained for three years and came out the other side able to end any fight with one punch. The regimen was a hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a hundred squats and a ten kilometre run every day, with the air conditioning off. It cost him his hair. Whether that is the real explanation is an argument the series never settles.
The problem is that winning stopped meaning anything. He fights to feel something, feels nothing, and worries instead about supermarket sales, his rent, and hero rankings that keep him near the bottom because he is bad at written exams. The comedy comes from the mismatch. What gives it weight is that he is right to be unhappy.
ONE drew the original webcomic in 2009 in a rough, hurried style on a free site, and it found millions of readers anyway. Yusuke Murata, who drew Eyeshield 21, offered to redraw it, and the result is one of the best-drawn action manga ever printed wrapped around a joke about a man who cannot be bothered. Madhouse animated the first season in 2015.
Spelling SAITAMA
SAITAMA is seven letters and three of them are A's, sitting in the second, fifth and seventh slots. It is also a real place: Saitama Prefecture is just north of Tokyo, which is the sort of unglamorous name a joke hero deserves. Watch the opening pair, since AI reads as one sound and loses its I in a hurry. SAITAMA.